Wild boar, sliced thin and arranged on the plate in overlapping rings so that it resembles a peony in flower, then simmered in a miso broth with vegetables. The name of the dish is the name of the flower.

The order of events is the reverse of what people assume. It is usually explained that the arrangement looks like a peony, and that this is where the name came from. In fact the name came first, by some years, and the arrangement was designed afterwards to match it.

Before that it was simply called ino-nabe, boar pot. In 1908 an army regiment was garrisoned in this town, and the soldiers took to eating boar from the Tanba hills as a strengthening food, simmered in miso, between training exercises. In 1931 the local chamber of commerce ran a competition for the words of a folk song about Sasayama, and the phrase botan-nabe appears in the fourth verse of the winning entry. That is its first recorded use.

The flower arrangement was worked out around 1945, by an old inn in the town, to fit the name it had been given. Even the heavy miso and the sansho pepper are later additions, arrived at to soften the smell of the meat. Almost everything anybody points to as characteristic was added to the dish after it had been named.